La Milpa

20/03/2014

The Latin Garden members at Addision Road have celebrated their first harvest from their special ‘La Milpa’ project. La Milpa represents Latin America and includes lots of vegetables that are part of Latin culture and daily food.

The Latin Garden is a communal space where Spanish speakers learn,practice and share knowledge about composting, wormfarming and growing food in Sydney.
It started as and open place for people in Sydney; to get together and have conversations about the environment, people and cultures behind the Spanish language.
We've got together most Sunday mornings around our garden bed @ Addison Road Community Centre.

During these past months we have learned lots of very interesting things.We've had several activities ,like how to prepare our own compost, worm farm and home made fertilizers. A few highlights are our pickles workshop on  “ love food hate waste” and our “Milpa Project
“Our first moment together as a group was fantastic, we walked together from knowing zero to lots of new stuff,we've  enjoyed every single moment we've been here.  After the first few workshops we started our personal compost at home or some people brought stuff to Addison rd and contributed to the community compost. We learned about worm farms, which inspired some others to give it a go. 
When we set the garden bed up, we learned that by mixing hay, compost, leaves and manure we could grow anything we wanted. We've spent a lot of time coming to this place. At the garden bed, we started growing tomatoes, chillies, ruda, mint.
During the time we've been here,we've practiced several techniques to keep away those silly insects that weren’t helping our own plants to grow healthy and green. After the first harvest we started our spring project: “La Milpa”.
 La Milpa represents Latin America in lots of ways, over there we grew up with tortillas, beans, chilies and pumpkins. All of these vegetables are part of our culture and our daily meals, which we miss in our new home living so far away,.. For this reason we wanted to share and learned that by growing our own plants.
Two weeks ago we had a meeting here at Addison rd to chat about the activities we've   loved the most.  Nearly all of us considered that the day we made our pickles was the best. Not only because we learned a fabulous technique to preserve our food, but also the many things we can actually do to avoid throwing away food.
Overall, we are very happy to be part of such great project, which now is part of our lives. We will keep on practicing what we've learned here. I, personally, loved having the opportunity of learning this way, by doing things. But what we have most enjoyed above all, is learning as a group and sharing our culture with others.
Thank you Pilar for sharing your knowledge with us and preparing your classes, always coming with a big smile to teach us something new. Thanks Addison Rd for giving us a space to grow our crops and a roof for our courses and thanks to the Sustainable Living Project for giving your support.